What is a 'soft-scripted' show versus an unscripted show?
There are two kinds of soft scripted shows. Some people call them hybrid shows. One type of soft scripting is the kind that comes from fiction towards reality, and that would be something like The Office, which starts out with fictional characters in a fictional company in a fictional workplace. It moves towards reality in that those people are so absorbed in their characters that they improve some of the scenes and some of the camera work. They know pretty much where it's going, but they improve through this soft scripting. Another one like that is a little closer to reality: Curb Your Enthusiasm. The character Larry David is very similar to the real guy Larry David. That's not really his wife, but she is similar to his real wife, and some of those things didn't happen to him but something very similar to that did happen to him. Some of those things actually did happen to him. It's kind of all mashed up and the soft scripting here improves the show. You get a show that goes from fiction towards reality and it's not like from reality towards fiction. The shows that I do, which are usually competition shows or some kind of social experiment reality shows, start with full on truth. These are not fictional people and it's the true story of what happened in this experiment, but it moves towards fiction. Some things you see that happened first, we don't show happening first, we show them happening second. Sometimes we'll tell the story either in a compressed way or in a more compelling way. What we are basically doing is that we are amping up the truth. We are fictionalizing a little bit the truth of what happened on reality shows. We move into soft scripting in that way. Soft-scripting comes in both directions.
